MOVIE REVIEW: American Grindhouse

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MOVIE REVIEW: American Grindhouse

POSTED: Friday, April 30, 2010, 4:39 PM

Filed Under: Movies Movie Review

american-grindhouse

I had a professor in college whose focus was on early film. She used to joke that mere minutes after Thomas Edison invented the movie camera, exploitation cinema was born. The sentiment is echoed in director Elijah Drenner's ode to the shocking and schlocking films that filled grindhouse theaters. But what is grindhouse? It's the taboo onscreen, it's movies made on shoestring and shown on the fringe. Drenner begins his study with white slavery-scare silents and moves throughout film history from the Hays code to '50s drug propaganda to '70s gorefests to The Passion of the Christ, which director John Landis (Trading Places, Animal House) calls the genre's only true recent touchstone.

Drenner's history is loving a tribute in the vein of Easy Riders and Raging Bulls — docs that fill your Netflix queue with movies that you never get around to watching. There are some glaring omissions in its roster of talking heads — where is explotation king Roger Corman? But guys like Landis and director Joe Dante (Gremlins, Piranha), who recounts how a man was killed at grindhouse, but the houselights never went up, nor did the movie start — are entertaining and passionate enough about the subject to make up for any absences.

American Grindhouse, Fri., April 30, 8:30 p.m., free, PUFF at the Piazza at Schmidts, 1050 N. Hancock St.

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